Monday, June 13, 2011

Local Solutions Forum

Are you part of a local or international organization or foundation that supports locally-driven development? Yes? Then we would like to invite you to join the Local Solutions Forum!

A little bit of history….

In May, Spark held its first "Community Empowerment" webex meeting to which we invited fellow organizations that support locally driven development solutions. The meeting was very successful; So successful in fact that it got us thinking about next steps, how we can grow the group and how to continue to collaborate with other like-minded organizations and individuals. There are many other groups supporting locally-designed development efforts, but there is relatively little conversation and knowledge share happening right now. Let's change that. After all, we certainly don't want to recreate the wheel, but help each other toward a common goal. As a result, we created the Local Solutions Forum (http://groups.google.com/group/local-solutions-forum)--an online discussion group to promote and explore locally-led development.

Save the date because the Local Solutions forum kicks-off the discussion on July 4th. Between now and then we are focusing on outreach to get as many participants from all over the world—from local and international organizations to large and small foundations.

Here’s the plan….

Every Monday a new group will “present” via an all-group email. The first week of each month will be for smaller in-country groups that work locally. The second week will be for a global organization that supports local solutions in one or more locales. The third week will be a member-lead discussion on a topic relevant to local solutions. The fourth week will be for a funder. And then we’ll start over again. Each discussion will be entirely over email—the discussion leader is expected to start the week off with an email post to the group, which will be followed by back-and-forth questions, comments, and answers over the course of the week.